No one likes Mondays, so each Monday I like to walk through a complex development topic and give a dead simple explanation of how it works in the real world. So even if your day is rough at least you’ll have learned something new, or at least a new way of thinking about it.

Today I will cover how object oriented programming (also called OOP) works. When I started programming over a decade ago I learned how to build applications procedurally with languages such as C and PHP. If you’re not familiar with procedural code, it simply means that you build the program in sequential order and call methods when you want shared behavior between pages in the application. For example, if I had an invoicing application, I’d have a page for creating a new invoice, another page for showing the invoice, etc. And each page would have scripts that would call methods such as ones connecting it to the database or rendering a date in a specific format.

Now that you have a high level view of how procedural programming works, how does object oriented programming work? I like to think of object oriented programming as a way of modeling a program, where all of the functionality is abstracted so it can be shared throughout the application. Let’s take a look at a real world case study.

Imagine that you’re building an application that allows users to create accounts and you also need to have the ability to make some people administrators. In object oriented programming you’d have a User class, in that class you’d have methods such as:

Register

Sign in

Encrypt password

Etc

Now we have the issue that you have two types of users: regular users and site administrators. For the most part both user types are pretty similar, the only differences will be things such as editing pages and admin type tasks. In procedural programming you’d need to create two different types of users which would lead to having quite a bit of duplicate code. However in object oriented programming you can simply create a User class, and then create RegularUser and AdminUser classes that inherit from the parent User class.

When child classes inherit from the parent class they get access to all of the methods and functionality of the parent class, and then you as a developer can give them custom behavior. So for our case study the AdminUser class would contain methods unique to it that the RegularUser class wouldn’t have, which would give it the administrator functionality.

Do you see how that works?

Object oriented programming, at at high level, is all about being able to structure code in a way where functionality can be inherited and behavior modified however the developer sees fit. If done properly object oriented programming can lead to very elegantly written programs that have minimal code duplication.

I hope you have a better idea of how object oriented programming works, obviously this was a high level view of how it operates, in the resource section I’ve placed links where you can take a deep dive and learn more about how it works along with how to build real world object oriented programs.

On Fridays I cover various tips for freelancers and today I’m going to discuss some strategies that I’ve used successfully over the years for getting new clients.

There have been three main ways that I’ve gotten new clients:

Outsourcing services such as Odesk and Elance (which have now merged to be Upwork)

LinkedIn

Referrals

In future episodes I’ll go into detail on various ways that I’ve had success in each one of those channels so that you can take some of the experiences I’ve had and apply them to your own freelance careers.

Freelancing services such as Upwork are great for finding new clients, the keys to success are to constantly send out proposals, dozens per day and be quick to communicate with potential clients. If you’re a US or UK based developer make sure you understand that you’ll be competing from developers from all over the world which means that the bids that you’ll be competing with could be dramatically lower than what you’d want to charge. However I’ve been able to get dozens of long term clients from these services, including large organizations such as Eventbrite and Quip.

LinkedIn is an interesting tool for freelancers, I’ve gotten several clients from the service simply by having a filled out profile and joining user groups for the languages and frameworks that I specialize in. I’ve gotten clients such as AppDev and the Flatiron School from LinkedIn. Interestingly enough I was never pro active with reaching out to clients, if you have a good profile showcasing your skills and join enough groups the jobs start to come in. It’s incremental growth, but I’ve found some great clients though LinkedIn.

Lastly referrals are one of the best ways to get clients. This marketing channel typically takes the most time depending on your own social and client network. When I say referral I’m not simply referencing referrals from other clients, I’ve gotten referrals from co-workers, friends, family, and through networking events such as local Chambers of Commerce organizations.

I hope this has been a helpful guide to different freelancer strategies for growing your client base, stay tuned for future episodes where I go into detail on how I’ve worked in each channel and built up a large set of customers.

Hi, this is episode 4 of CronDose, I’m your host Jordan Hudgens, I’m a Ruby dev and CTO of DevCamp.com

On Thursdays I cover an item in the news for the tech sector, and specifically discuss how it relates to developers. Today I’m going to discuss the announcement by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the world,

“Today, people around the world spend on average more than 50 minutes a day using Facebook, Instagram and Messenger…and that doesn’t count WhatsApp.”

Depending on your own usage of this social channels that number may or may not surprise you and it may say something about how the world is transitioning towards a different type of social interactivity. However the topic for this video is how to build that same type of habit forming behavior into your own applications.

Last month I read Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business” on habits as they relate to technology where he explains some of the key elements that drive our addiction to applications like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Most of the features that get us to stay on these applications so much are focused on the reward and convenience centers of our brains.

Our brains like things that are easy, and checking our what our friends are doing on Instagram doesn’t require much work, and since it’s on our phone it’s pretty convenient to pop the app open a few times an hour to see what everyone is up to. For the reward portion of our brain, even though it may not seem like a big deal, each time we get a new follower or a few more likes on a picture it triggers the reward section of our brains, which functions in many ways like a drug and drives us to want more followers and more likes.

Based on some of this research I wanted to present the following recommendations for building features into your own applications that will help drive habit driven behavior, some features that could be built in would be:

If you are trying to teach users a topic, show them a progress bar and increment it each time they finish a lesson or quiz, them seeing the progress bar slide up closer to 100% will give them a mental reward and make them keep coming back for more.

For a mobile application make sure you take advantage of notifications, most brains have a hard time ignoring notifications on an app, the curiosity makes us want to click on it to see what it says, which will continue to drive users back to the application.

Give rewards for completing tasks, Foursquare, Yelp, and even the Apple Watch’s exercise application give our badges for successfully finishing undertakings, creating awards for streak based behavior, such as exercising for 5 days in a row, are very powerful motivators.

Hopefully those ideas will help give you a start on how to build habit forming behavior into your own applications, good luck with the coding!

On Wednesdays on CronDose I cover a random programming topic and today I’m going to discuss one of the quotes that I’ve always turned to for inspiration. It’s from Ayn Rand’s book, The Fountainhead. The main character in the book, Howard Roark, is a skilled architect and typifies the concept of being a true craftsman, in the same way that all of us, as developers, should approach our own projects. This quote discusses how every project is special and deserves a unique implementation, and it goes as follows:

“Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose.” Howard Roark, The Fountainhead

Even though this was written in the early 1900s and was for the architecture industry, Roark’s approach to craftsmanship can be applied just as easily to programming. It can be easy to fall into the trap of staying in a comfort zone and simply duplicating implementation and functionality from project to project, however that can create two problems:

You don’t grow as a developer, the only way to get better is to step out of your comfort zone and build features that you’ve never done before so you can learn new concepts.

Projects suffer, becoming square pegs in round holes. Each application has its own set of unique requirements and therefore should have a custom implementation.

I hope that you found Roark’s wisdom inspirational and that you can apply it to your own development projects.

On Tuesdays at CronDose we talk about coding interview strategies and today we’re going to discuss the difference between class and instance methods.

I’m a Ruby developer and this episode’s answer will be addressed from the Ruby perspective, however it’s a concept that can be important to know in other languages as well, for example Objective C and Java have class and instance method options.

So what do you do when the interviewer asks the difference between class and instance methods?

From a practical perspective a class method can be called by itself, for example, if you had a class that handled sending SMS messages, you could call the class method by itself and simply pass in the values that you want to send in the SMS message.

An instance method is a function that requires an instance of the class to be created. In the SMS example we didn’t need to create an SMS instance, we only cared about the system sending the text message. An example of an instance method would be something like a full name method in a Customer class. If you want to know the full name of a customer you most likely have a customer in mind and Already instanciated the class into an object with a specific Customer selected.

In summary, I typically use instance methods since I’m usually calling methods on objects, class methods are helpful from time to time, but in many cases they can be a sign of poorly constructed code since many class methods could be refactored into modules and out of classes.